Excellence with leadership: the crown indicator of SCImago Institutions Rankings Iber report

Abstract

Although there are many models for ranking higher education institutions, the SCImago Institutions Rankings  methodology stands out for its ability to present quantitative and qualitative indicators of scientific output. Besides Total number of published papers, several indicators are concerned with quality dimensions of published papers, such as International collaboration, Scientific leadership or High quality publications . However, official rankings are provided solely on the basis of one indicator: Output (total number of published papers ). This paper presents a statistical I-distance method that integrates all the indicators into one value, which therefore represent a rank and show which of the input indicators is the most important for the process of ranking. Our results clearly showed that Excellence with Leadership  occupies the most significant spot